England's Test against India at Edgbaston has provided respite from the upheaval of the past few days. Photograph: Tim Hales/AP

On the horizon, from the top of the towering new stand, black smoke billowed from a scrapyard blaze. Not suspicious, according to police, but a reminder nonetheless that beyond the confines of Edgbaston cricket ground, where England and India again did battle, Birmingham continued to suffer loss and destruction.

Spectators gathering for the start of the third Test had awoken to news that three British Asian men had been knocked down and killed by a car in the Dudley Road area of England's second city. Men who had just left the local mosque and who had joined neighbourhood attempts to protect their property from the violence and looting that had blighted the city in the previous 48 hours.

The notion of cricket as a retreat from the harsher realities of the world does not please everybody, but it has never seemed more apt. Spectators asked whether it was appropriate that the Test went ahead were liable to respond with looks of utter incomprehension. The riots were one thing, the Test match quite another. They felt themselves moving between unconnected worlds.

It has been a demoralising week as England agonises over a nihilistic underclass soured by a society built on an obsessive consumerism in which they cannot partake and so abysmally lacking in communal values that they can wantonly destroy their own cities, and imagine that they have achieved some twisted social solidarity in the process.

Seven hours at a Test match was an opportunity to become absorbed in something different. There was talk of spectators who had become caught up in the riots, whose houses had been broken into, or shops damaged, and as the crowd became silent one wondered if thoughts were straying elsewhere. Then Gautam Gambhir dragged Tim Bresnan on to his stumps, driving, and the crowd roared its approval. It was a powerful, communal roar. It has rarely sounded so good.

When Sachin Tendulkar was at the crease, on what with every batting failure seems likely to be his last tour of England, nothing else mattered. Vaguely attempt to debate the failures of social policy, Michael Gove's dropping of citizenship classes, or the potentially destructive consequences of a cut in the top rate of tax and the reply came back: "That's cut back over the top of middle stump." Life had moved on. And when Tendulkar fell for a single, one of four Indian wickets down by lunch, in yet another ovation there came gratitude not just for his talent but his decency.

England's football friendly against Holland at Wembley had been cancelled because the police could not guarantee crowd safety. But supporters of England and India descended together upon Edgbaston as they always have, with barely a police officer in sight. Two plumper policemen strolled down Pershore Road with little to occupy them, as if valuing a few peaceful hours after the horrors of the past two nights. In the Eric Hollies Stand, fans – dressed in red to raise £75,000 for the charity Cure Leukaemia – welcome sanity in a week when red had been associated with fire, blood and flashing alarms.

Forgive us our retreat into games, because cricket's sense of moral compass has never seemed more valuable. The Spirit of Cricket might be a somewhat nebulous concept, and easily dismissed, but it underpins the structures and the rhythms of the game and provides a basis for great deeds and decent behaviour, and somehow that seems more comforting than ever.

And English cricket is not just about Broad bowling to Tendulkar. There exists initiatives such as Chance to Shine, which is committed to re-establishing cricket in state schools, or Street Chance, which uses cricket to build civic pride in inner-city areas blighted by crime and deprivation. The ambitions have never seemed more idealistic. When the cricket ends, the crowd will spill back on to those streets, briefly revitalised, perhaps even a little more optimistic, imagining that out there somehow, somewhere there must be a solution.